By Dick Stark

Last Thursday RightStar hosted a BMC Foot-Prints/Service Core v12 Webinar for a large group of SDE, Remedy, FootPrints, and Track-It customers and prospects.  One of the participants emailed, “I’m loving the Footprints 12 demo.   Thoroughly impressed!  You might just have a sale” What makes FootPrints v12 so different?  Here are several reason why FootPrints v12, which was just released last month will be a real hit.

Visuals/Views. First, v12 is not an upgrade to old FootPrints, it is a brand new product. And it sure looks good.  Overall appearance and colors are customizable by user and department. Multiple portals are now supported, e.g., IT, HR, and Facilities. The modernistic design consists of tiles, tabs, and bread crumbs.  Additionally, there are plenty of attractive icons, e.g., Service Catalog IT items and non-IT requests like a hot or cold thermometer. (A blue thermometer means that you need to submit a facility request to turn up the heat—you get the idea.)

End-User Experience. What really jumps out, is that the BMC designers understand the importance of user adoption. RightStar’s experience with more than 800 deployments in 10 years is that the implementation of the toolset is the easy part. What’s difficult is getting clients to fully buy-into the changes that accompany a new process redesign and toolset roll out. Because of the emphasis on the end-user experience, the value of v12 to the client organization becomes obvious and real.

One place that BMC made significant improvements is the self-service interface. By making the interface intuitive and self-learning, users can quickly search the knowledge base and submit requests. Since neither requires a call to the service desk, the impact to the organization is significant. One specific “cool” feature is the self-service form layouts.  By creating forms that offer “complete the sentence” functionality, forms can be filled out quickly and easily.  Best of all the use of common language for the end users allows the service desk to categorize and prioritize the incident automatically.

Graphical Work-Flow Designer. A significant improvement over old FootPrints is the ease of customization and building workflow.  V12 uses an intuitive Visio like layout. For example, for a change process, requests, workflow, approvals, and business rules are all included in one easy to follow flow chart. To update an existing workflow, drag and drop, and connect the lines as appropriate.

Finally, v12 is a complete offering consisting of all required ITIL modules.  Combined with Asset Core, organizations can take full advantage of the value that effective asset management brings to an organization.  For example, a service desk technician can view all the systems that an end-user has access (or a log-in).  This assists in trouble shooting the incident and problem management to prevent similar problems from re-occurring.

Even better, RightStar hosts both Service Core and Asset Core for organizations that don’t want to hassle with servers or software. Steve Jobs liked to say, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” For v12 that rings true.